How I Pivoted From Flat and Unhappy to $6m and High Growth
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hey folks, hope your Q3 and Q4 is off to a good start. We just wrapped up Founder 500 in Austin, Texas. Hundreds of bootstrap founders showed up. It was an amazing time. I loved meeting so many of you. This interview today is a recording from that session, which you're gonna love because now we have visuals, we have the founder teaching, and I made every single speaker include their revenue graphs and real artifacts in their presentations. Without further ado, let's jump in. You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com. We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool.
What inspired the host's journey from unhappiness to success?
It's like a big Excel sheet for all these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com.
Please help me in welcoming Chris Brisson from Sales Message to the Stage.
Chris, come on. Hello, everybody. I hope everyone is doing awesome. Actually, a fun fact. So I met Nathan, this is probably 2012, 2013, at InfusionCon. And he walks up to me and he says... you know, in typical Nathan fashion. Hey, man, what's your revenue? How much are you doing? Well, I'm freaking out going, who is this guy? I don't know who he is. He's asking all these awkward questions. And so this is, you know, eight, whatever, 10 years later, he's still asking these hard questions. So appreciate it, Nathan. Thank you for having me. Looking forward to it. So my name is Chris Bersan. I'm the co-founder and CEO of a company called Sales Message. And in this talk, I'm going to tell you sort of the journey, the story, some of the stuff that's working well for us, some tactical, but more of the entrepreneur journey, which I think we've all gone through.
So I'm going to talk about how I pivoted from flat and unhappy to 6 million and high growth, all completely bootstrapped. And here I have no hair, but now I have hair. So... Anyhow. All right. So over the next 20 minutes, I'm going to talk about really sort of three things here. One is the pivot. And if you've been an entrepreneur, you've probably created a company and you realize maybe it's something that you didn't really like. And I want to talk to you about this company that actually still exists today. It's called Call Loop. Talk about that journey and realize that, wow, this horse is not the horse that I want to bet on for my ultimate future. And that journey, how I lost a year and a half of time, 150 grand working on a product no one wanted.
Maybe you've done that. And really the one question that really changed everything. Then we're going to talk about the product vision, really dive into sales message. Our vivid product vision, how we can paint your future, how we've done that, what I call the platform game, how we can quantify product market fit, and really the vision for the overall product. Ship early, ship often, how MTP can be like the unlock to really grow your business. And then I'll talk to some keys to scale and keys to success. One thing I call stack the line. And this is how you create a multi-pronged SaaS company. not just one product, but multiple products that can continue to sort of allow a lot of expansion revenue, people, and then we'll talk about some pricing.
So, let's get into it. And actually, Nathan, I think these might be the old slides. Either way, we'll dive into it. So this is 2009, and prior to this, I was doing a lot of internet marketing, created courses and different programs, and I really enjoyed software. We created a couple tiny little software products And I had the idea for, would it be cool if you could do like voice broadcasting the same way that you could do email autoresponders? And that was like just this little idea. And this guy, Ronnie, posted a comment on my blog at the time. It was chrisperson.com. And here's what he said. And so this sort of blog comments turned into a partnership to create this product called Call Loop.
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